General Politics Discussion (IX) [ARCHIVED] • Page 1297

What is the data on BA.2 in terms of reinfections and vaccine efficacy? With the vax rates (even though they should be much higher) + natural immunity from omicron surge, I don't know if I see the next wave being substantial enough where using terms like "storm" and "much bigger than anyone saw coming" are warranted. But maybe I am just wishful thinking

 

Other places with higher vax/boost rates than us AND bad omicron waves are seeing bad waves starting now, so hard to believe it won’t hit here, unless we’re hoping our omicron wave was SO bad that it protects against B2 better than the other counties are seeing

 

I’d feel better if I wasn’t 5 months into my booster and it doesn’t look like a 3rd vaccine will be approved until the fall sometime. Oh and if my child could get vaccinated even once. Really hard to be optimistic at all

 

Yeah I’ll take another boost pls

 

As far as I've seen, it's similarly evasive of vaccines as BA.1, which, of course, is enough to create a huge wave in a population without significant immunity. But the thing that complicates this is the question of how well BA.1 immunity does against BA.2. I've seen some people say that BA.2 is as different from BA.1 as Delta was from the original Wuhan strain. The only antibody study I saw showed that antibodies from natural immunity with BA.1 were about 4x less against BA.2 (which is also pretty similar to the drop between Delta and the original strain). As far as I know, there wasn't a ton of reinfection risk with Delta, but it also wasn't being tracked as much back then. Personally, I take all of this, combined with data from other countries, to mean that we should certainly expect a spike soon, but I just don't see there being enough people who haven't already been exposed to COVID/vaccine multiple times (and therefore not have a well-prepared immune system) for this to blow up in the way Omicron did during the winter. I could be wrong, but I'm feeling moderately optimistic (although it is kinda sad that expecting "only" a small spike counts as optimism haha)

I would feel better with another, perhaps Omicron-specific, boost though

 

My wife is going to London and Paris next week. Is she going to bring home the new variant as a souvenir?

 

we don't have anything you don't already have

 

this is insane.

Boeing 737 Crashes Vertically Into Mountain in China With 132 on Board

 

...vertically?

edit - okay did not expect that gif just below the headline

 

so if a plane loses power or engines fail, it would be a slow descent to crash landing. This seems to be an extremely fast and downward crash. What’s going on.

 

There will potentially never be a good answer for this crash.

Vertical nosedive at a speed of 30k fpm sure doesn't seem like an accident but it also doesn't really make sense for intentionally downing the plane. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up with an official narrative about a mechanical failure and problematic recovery attempts, which will inevitably be disbelieved by many.